Climate change exists, and seems to be accelerating.
Regardless of your politics, we have people at the helms of the US (soon) and Russia (now) who are at least a little more likely to consider nuclear war than the leaders in the last 25 years.
So, let’s go worst-case scenario: what would the affect of Nuclear Winter be on climate change? Leaving humans out of it completely, would polar bears (say) be better off in the short term, medium term, long term? Worse off? About the same?
Not advocating nuclear war, of course, just curious. Note that I don’t think this scenario is terribly likely: if people want to debate it and the thread gets moved to GD, fine, but I’m more interested in what would happen to the climate and environment.
I am not sure how to cite this. I made the statement based on an interview with Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen November 24, 2016 full episode transcript | CBC Radio, in which she talked about the kind of leaders they were, and at the end there was a brief mention of the possibility.
My comment was based more on the nature of the two men’s leadership styles, at least insofar as we have seen them, compared to Gorbachov / Yeltsin / Bush / Clinton / Bush / Obama. With all of those but Obama, there is a zero percent chance of a nuclear war having occurred. With Obama, I think the chances of such a war between now and mid-January are very near zero. I think they’re also low for Putin and Trump, but we have seen Putin take the Crimea, something essentially unthinkable for a major power from 1945–2005, and also the proxy war in Syria. So you may disagree, but I don’t think it’s an extraordinary claim that Putin and Trump are willing to consider measures other modern world leaders would reject.
Since the question itself doesn’t actually depend on the likelihood of any particular leader pulling the trigger, let’s just ignore that aspect entirely.
[Not moderating]
The problem with trying to solve global warming via nukes is that, while nukes will indeed throw up a bunch of particulates that will block out sunlight and thus cool the Earth, that’s only a short-term effect. Eventually, those particulates will precipitate out, and all the carbon dioxide that was in the atmosphere will still be there. Worse, the process of setting off all of those bombs is likely to put even more CO[sub]2[/sub] into the atmosphere, due to fires, and so the effect when the particulates fall out will be even worse than it would be had there never been the war.
Now, in the longer term, it’d switch back to countering global warming, just because there will be many fewer humans afterwards than there were before, especially in the high-consumption First and Second World countries, so we’ll be burning a lot less fossil fuels going forwards. But that’s rather a draconian solution.
The political angle is just what made me think of the question. So the answer seems to be: short term, good for global cooling, long term, less clear; environmentally, depends on the affected areas?
Perhaps I wasn’t clear above. There is to be no further discussion of the likelihood of nuclear war in this thread. If you wish to pursue that topic, take it to GD.
I think the moderation was that nuclear war was okay to discuss, but not so much the circumstances that might cause a nuclear war in the current political climate. Which I’m fine with.